| |9 9 July 2020HIGHERReviewinvolves students acting as tutors to others (tutees) on a one-to-one basis under the supervision of the lecturer. Peer tutoring has been used to support learning across a wide range of academic subject areas, and has been found to facilitate both cognitive and social gains, including improvements in academic achievement for a diversity of learners.Peer tutoring enables students to receive individual attention through a relationship in which they feel un-threatened. Tutees receive frequent and immediate feed-back on their progress as well as positive reinforcement for their efforts from peers with whom they feel comfort-able.Tutors also gain academically from taking on the role of teaching others, and this mutual learning leads to im-provements in the social climate of the classroom, which is a major advantage for lecturers. Metacognitive strategies consist of explicit teaching and coaching of students in thinking skills that will allow them to improve their own learning by helping them to acquire new information more efficiently. For example, the teaching of study skills typically focuses on the learn-ing of skills to do with planning, monitoring and evalu-ating progress. This includes skills such as note-taking, summarising, using checklists, as well as learning vari-ous strategies for improving memory such as rehearsal and mnemonics.Concept mapping, also known as semantic mapping and use of graphic organizers, is a strategy that can be used in all subject areas to demonstrate the relationships between ideas. As these strategies build on prior knowl-edge, and are active forms of learning, they can be very effective teaching tools. Reciprocal teaching uses the skills of summarizing text, generating questions, clarifying and predicting. Each of these strategies is used as a means of aiding stu-dents to obtain meaning from texts as well as ensuring they understand what they are reading. Formative evaluation is a strategy in which informa-tion is collected on students’ learning to provide frequent feedback to them and to adjust teaching strategies in or-der to optimize learning.Providing frequent feedback motivates learners by informing them how well they have done, and by showing them how they can improve. To achieve these goals, feedback should be: timely, explicit, focused on strategy use, adjusted to the complexity of the task, provided in manageable units, and be directly useful to learners.By assessing where students are at initially, and exam-ining the gaps in students’ knowledge, the lecturer can plan the most appropriate activities to facilitate learning. Assessing how students are progressing after teaching in-terventions will direct the next learning steps, so that continued feedback and evaluation can indicate progress and provide information about subsequent teaching.Implementing these key evidence-based strategies can be done gradually by lecturers unfamiliar with them. A good way to start is by using concept mapping to intro-duce a new topic, presenting a framework of the topic and introducing the key terminology. Then a simple cooper-ative learning strategy such as ‘timed-pair-share’ can be used, asking students to work in pairs for a few minutes to encourage more engagement. Building on this, peer tutoring can be introduced to help students deal with a difficult concept or ‘Numbered Heads Together’ can be used to teach some aspect of thetopic. Finally, providing formative feedback on assignments during the course can bring about better academic outcomes as wellas make the course more enjoyable for students.Research evidence supporting these teaching strate-gies is available through Google and numerous video ex-amples of their use can be found on YouTube. Gaining more information on these four key strategies and watch-ing them being used will facilitate their implementation by lecturers and help to ensure that they are embedded in everyday university teaching practice.
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